


what's in your head

by scuttlesworth



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-11
Updated: 2013-09-11
Packaged: 2017-12-26 06:18:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 970
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/962601
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scuttlesworth/pseuds/scuttlesworth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Meditation on the method of loci as it applies to the characters.</p>
            </blockquote>





	what's in your head

**Author's Note:**

> Everyone knows the method of loci. Everyone uses it, to one extent or another. When you smell a familiar scent and are transported to another time, and feel your long-dead grandmother's arms; when you try to remember a name, and picture the place you met the person. Chip shop? No, Tesco's, that's it. 
> 
> All our memories have homes in our minds. Some people just put more work into theirs, is all.

Molly's mind is her apartment, subtly altered. She's never heard of the method of loci as such, but spends time considering her world slightly improved- idealized, just a bit. For example; in the rooms of her mind, the wallpaper is different. Instead of rather dingy old flock wallpaper coming up on the bottom corner where the damp has gotten to it, most of the walls are papered in deep fuschia, royal blue, and emerald green. The bathroom is the only pastel exception. In the (much larger)  bathroom, papered in palest pink and faded gold, with white clouds that - if you look closely  - make the most adorable kitten faces - is a lovely claw-foot tub without any grout problems at all. 

Her mental furniture is somewhat unusual, as far as rooms go; in the middle of the living room are a plasticine man and woman she once saw at an exhibition. They have been vividly flayed open to expose the nerve and muscle  as an anatomy lesson. 

Oh, and all her windows open out to other countries- her bedroom window shows a temple in Thailand she has never seen in real life, and the living room opens out onto a rather dingy alley in France where she stayed for a holliday week once. 

 

 

**********

 

Sherlock calls it a palace, but it's really just all of London in his head. Often including the insides of the buildings. Mostly public buildings, although this can be caveated by adding that they include an alarming ammount of the bits not open to the public. And there are rarher more of the insides of private apartments and houses than their owners would be quite Comfortable with, if they knew. 

 

 

**********

 

John has a little room with four doors. 

The first is his front door from when he was a child. Behind it he and Harry argue and pull Christmas crackers and it smells like cabbage and cookies. 

The second is the side door to saint Bart's, the one the students used to sneak out for a smoke. Behind it is his first autopsy and first shag, which both happened on the same day. It sometimes smells like formaldyhide. 

Door three is a battered bit of plywood which leaks sand and heat around the edges. It humms with the sound of flies buzzing past your ears, and smells like hot clean sand, rotting meat, and shit. 

Door four is the door to 221 Baker street, and behind it lies a patchwork map of london. Nothing like Sherlock's map at all, really. The good bits are much better and the bad bits are much worse, and there are only a half dozen bits altogether. Like thumbnail images for the larger city, you could say. It smells like damp socks, tea, and Hydrochloric acid. 

 

 

**********

 

Mycroft has a labyrinth. It is based on an equation which renders fractally. Every door leads to a room with at least one smaller door inside it, or three. The secret is that Mycroft can fit through any of the doors, no matter how small. His secrets are scattered throughout the rooms based on an overlaying but non-attached and unrelated map, and the routes one must take to get to those secrets are not straight at all. The overlaying map is occasionally Pakistan, occasionally Nigeria, and - when he is in a sentimental mood- the old U.S.S.R. Each overlaying map holds the key to a different set of secrets. 

There's a fourth map hidden in the center of the fractal maze. It was drawn on paper stained beige with tea, and has a dotted line leading to a red x.  He almost never uses it anymore. 

 

 

**********

 

Lestrade has a precinct house where the coffee is delicious, the paperwork is always done, and the phone never rings because there is no crime. He sits there sipping the coffee and staring at the window, which is clean, contemplating the sky with zen-like satisfaction in the silence of his world. 

 

 

**********

 

Irene had a mansion, which she set on fire to build a hotel, which she demolished to make way for a castle, which she sank into an ocean to have a tropical island paradise, which she paved over to have a moderistic cubist archetectuaral marvel. Which she promptly sold in favor of a proper dungeon, which she decided was a cliche and abandoned for a penthouse in a skyscraper in a tower she owned. 

She never thinks about the mansion anymore. Those days are long gone - and besides, the wench is dead. 

 

 

**********

 

Moriarty had nothing but a howling black hole. He never saw the episode of Doctor Who where the Doctor and the Master looked into the untempered schism, but if he had, he would have laughed and laughed and laughed. (He didn't much like the new Master anyways, what with them giving him all those *reasons* to be evil. Evil, he knew, was just a way of looking at the world so you could get what you wanted. Everyone was evil in their hearts; the old Master knew this. The old Master was *honest*, like the Daleks. But smarter. Who would the Daleks play with, when they killed everything? No endgame, that was their problem.) 

 

 

**********

 

Mrs. Hudson, of course, has Baker Street, exactly as it exists in the real world, down to the weather and the pebbles. Except for one photo album, which contains a somewhat expanded set of photos from reality; beside a photo of her husband driving on Daytona Beach is a picture of the courthouse where he was sentenced, and alongside the pictures of them smiling at Disney World are pictures of him sitting in prison clothes behind bars. The last photo is of something she was not present for in real life, but which she takes great satisfaction in seeing anyways: an electric chair. 


End file.
